specimens!' Doc declared.
'But how did he know they were there?' Monk muttered.
It was Oliver Wording Bittman who suggested an answer. He indicated the spire of a skyscraper some blocks distant. From an observation tower which topped this, it was possible to see into Doc’s office.
'They must have had a man watching from there!' he offered.
Doc drew the shades, saying, 'It won’t happen again.'
'Doc, that shows you were on the right trail with those specimens,' Johnny, the geologist, spoke up excitedly. He adjusted his glasses which had the magnifying lens on the left side. 'Otherwise, Kar would not have taken so much trouble to take them away.'
Night had fallen. In the great buildings surrounding Doc’s high perch, only a few glowing freckles marked lighted windows.
The police commissioner of the City of New York paid Doc Savage’s office a call in person to express his appreciation for Doc’s services thus far in wiping out the fiendish Kar and his gang. Shortly after this, Doc received a telegram, also expressing thanks, from the New Jersey police official in whose jurisdiction the murder of Jerome Coffern had occurred.
And the tabloid newspapers ranted at the cops for not telling their reporters what was happening. The police were keeping secret Doc’s connection with the sudden epidemic of death among criminals, at his request.
Doc now locked himself in his laboratory. He retrieved from the bottom of the microscope, where he had hidden it, the tiny capsule which had held the Smoke of Eternity. With all the resources of his great laboratory and his trained brain, he set to work to learn the nature of the strange metal.
It was nearly midnight when he came out of the laboratory.
'You fellows stick here,' he told Monk, Ham, Renny, Johnny, Long Tom and Oliver Wording Bittman.
He departed without telling the six men whence he was bound or what nature of plan his profound mind had evolved.
Chapter 11. DOC SPRINGS A TRAP
THREE o’clock in the morning!
A black ghost of a night seemed to have sucked the city into its maw. There was fog, like the clammy breath of that night ghost. Out on the bay, a night-owl ferry to Staten Island hooted disconsolately at some fancied obstruction in its path.
The financial district was quiet. The silence in Wall Street was like that among the tombstones in Trinity Churchyard, which lies at the uphill end of the street.
The big feet of occasional policemen made dull clappings on the deserted sidewalks. Periodic subway trains rumbled like monstrous sleepy beasts underground.
Things more sinister were impending around the bank, the vaults of which held the gold coin that tomorrow was to go to the aid of hard-pressed Chicago financial institutions.
The watchman didn’t know it, as yet. He was a thick-headed chap, honest, but inclined to do things suddenly and think about it later.
'When I see somethin’ suspicious, I shoot and ask questions afterward,' he was wont to say. He was proud of this. So far, it had miraculously failed to get him into serious trouble. The only people he had shot were those who happened to need it.
The watchman noted a strange grayish haze which seemed to hang in the bank. He passed this off as fog. He would have thought differently, had he seen an enormous hole which gaped in one wall of the building. But he failed to see this, because most of his attention went to the doors and windows, where crooks usually tried to enter.
Nor did the watchman see a ratty man who slid out of the gloom of a cashier’s cage. This marauder raised an air pistol. He pointed it at the man’s back.
Suddenly a mighty bronze form flashed from the adjacent cage. A powerful hand clipped upon the air pistol. Another terrible hand covered all the ratty man’s face, drawing the loose skin, lips and nostrils into a tight bunch from which no outcry could escape.
There ensued a brief flurry. The air pistol went off with a dull
Only then did the watchman wake up. He spun, instinctively tugging at his hip pocket for his gun. His jaw fell in horror.
The ratty man had taken the missile from the air pistol. The fellow lay on the floor. That is — his upper body lay there! His legs had already dissolved in a grisly grayish smoke, shot through and through with weird electrical flashes.
The air pistol slug of Smoke of Eternity had hit the man in the foot. The discharge of the thing was an accident.
Over the dissolving form towered an awesome man-figure that looked like solid, tempered bronze, it was such a figure as the watchman had never seen.
The watchman went wild. He tried to put into effect his shoot-first-and-question-later creed. He got his gun out.
But about that time, a ton of dynamite seemed to explode on his jaw. He never even saw the great bronze fist which had hit him.
Doc Savage swept the watchman up. He glided silently across the floor. The gloom behind a vice president’s desk swallowed him and his burden.
INTO the bank now came more than a dozen furtive men. They carried automatic pistols and submachine guns.
One man alone had an air pistol. 'C’mon!' he snarled. 'Kar’s orders was to push this right through!'
'Hey, Guffey!' called one. 'Didja fix the watchman?'
When there was no answer from their companion, they muttered uneasily. Then they advanced.
'Gosh, look!' a man choked.
On the floor, just turning into the horrible gray vapor, lay a human head.
'It’s Guffey!'
For a moment, it looked like they were going to flee. The sight of the fantastic thing happening to Guffey’s head drained whatever courage they had.
'Aw, get next to yourselves, you mugs!' sneered the man who carried the only other air pistol. 'You don’t see the watchman around, do you? Guffey just had a little accident. The Smoke of Eternity dissolved both him and the watchman.'
After a few more mutters, the explanation of the watchman’s absence and Guffey’s demise was accepted. The men set to work. They advanced on the vault. The man with the air pistol fired it at the vault door.
Instantly, the thick steel began dissolving into the strange smoke.
Over in the shadow of the vice president’s desk, Doc Savage’s sensitive bronze fingers explored the air pistol, the slug from which had finished Guffey. He was disgusted to learn it held no other capsule cartridge of the Smoke of Eternity.
Doc recalled the words of the man dying from a lopped-off hand aboard the
The dissolving of the vault door had now ceased, the potency of the missile of Smoke of Eternity exhausted.
Kar’s men were reluctant to go near the opening, at first. They were like boys playing with a mad dog. They didn’t know but what the fearsome dissolving substance might do them harm.
